Boeing 787 Maiden Flight Search Results Poisoned

As Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet completes its much hyped first flight on December 15, 2009, web enthusiasts hit Internet to find related news articles and videos. This has given yet another opportunity to blackhat hackers to poison Google search results.

For many hours, "787 first flight video" has reportedly been the most popular search. This and other related searches contain malicious results pushing rogue anti-virus software (scareware). According to security experts, scareware is specifically designed to disrupt or damage a PC.

According to reports, 5 out of 9 initial results at peak hours led to malicious content as users were forced through a sequence of redirect web pages and to different distribution points.

As revealed by security firm eSoft's company blogger, despite variation in malicious payloads and distribution points, their effectiveness remained intact. Majority of websites were not detected by Google Safe Browsing as well as the malicious payloads delivered by them had extremely low anti-virus detection rates, as per the news published by TechWorld in the third week of December 2009.

This latest incident further supported a widely accepted fact in the security community that Internet is for sure a dangerous place for gullible news-searchers. It's amazing to watch how rapidly and efficiently these bad guys react to current news trends and victimize netizens.

In addition to this, it strengthened another fact that blackhat SEO or search engine poisoning is gaining high popularity among cybercriminals, through which they can trick users to click bogus and malicious sites, and thereby increase infection rates. In this attack, the detection was far much difficult as dangerous results towards the top appeared to be compromised websites having existing repute.

Finally, scareware assaults have successfully developed as a fraud tactic and have positioned itself as a highly profitable monetization scheme applied by hackers. Moreover, considering its profitability, security experts believe that this fraud tactic is likely to increase in 2010. In fact, this prediction has constituted the underlying point of almost all security firms' security predictions for 2010.